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Art For Sale - Saint Michael Miniature Pen and Ink Drawings
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Our Lady of Guadalupe, stippled ink on genuine sheep skin, a (finished) Work In Progress |
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Guild of Natural Science Illustrators, Inc.
The Society of Tempera Painters
Marians Of The Immaculate Conception
F1 Hybrid Seed Production
specifically in geraniums, also applies in general to seed production
The F1 hybrids that are available to us today are gorgeous, but before you expect to see similar blooms when saving your own seeds, you may want to refresh your memory about the definition of F1 hybrid.
I have a book by David Clark titled Pelargoniums, published in conjunction with Kew Gardens as one of their Gardening Guides. It is a wonderful book, and I quote below from it regarding F1 hybrid seed production.
"The majority of commercially available seed strains are F1 hybrids. These are produced by crossing two inbred lines to obtain a new, uniform and vigorous cultivar.
It can be a rewarding experiment for growers to sow some seed saved from their own plants, a lot can be learnt from the process. Plants raised from the seed of a single specimen will often show remarkable variations in flower colour, height, vigour, etc. This can be very interesting to an amateur grower, though the plants would be of little value to a commercial grower who needs uniformly sized plants of a known colour and performance........
.....If the seeds are sown from an attractive plant that has been deliberately fertilized with its own pollen there will still be a considerable lack of uniformity among the seedlings. Genetically the level of uniformity will improve at a rate of 50 per cent with every self-pollinated generation. If selection and self-pollination is carried out for a minimum of seven generations all variations will have been lost and the resulting seedlings will be identical. Although one goal has been realized, the process of inbreeding invariable decreases vigour and cultivars produced in this way have not been a great commercial success. However, if two of these inbred lines are crossed together the resulting seedlings should have hybrid vigour, and although they can be different in appearance from either parent they are uniform in all respects. These are the F1 hybrids that are sold commercially."
This definition is one of the most concise I have come across for explaining F1 hybridization. The book itself is a well-written and beautiful record of Pelargoniums.
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